The Good, the Bad and the Ugly... Design

I found the chapter on recognizing good and bad design in "The Non-Designer's Web Book" helpful, but also dated and thus lacking. I got a chuckle or two out of some of the "awesomely bad" examples of 8th-grade-history-teacher-quality websites the book showcased. The reality that many amateur web designers include random animated gifs and clip art as soon as someone shows them the tag, producing gaudy or kitsch sites that hurt your eyes and are illegible, is as undeniably as it is funny.

Still, some of the advice the authors give is simply out of date. For example, they suggest all good designs should fit within 640 x 460. Monitors now very rarely run such a tiny resolution. Making any site smaller than 800 x 600 wastes space and forces the user to either click more links to find your content or scroll more, neither of which eye movement tracking studies show users are readily willing to do. Some other signs that the guide is dated are the acceptance of frames. Frames have largely gone out of vogue in the design techniques of "Web 2.0" designers (don't ask me what web 2.0 is, other than contemporary design). They also seem to accept the dominance of tables in design. The best modern design no longer touches tables, and even mediocre design is beginning to use less of them. CSS deserves some recognition (even if my template for the final project uses tables for the layout - www.missouri.edu/~mjv2dc/finalproject). I also disagree that links need to always be underlined. Using a different color for text links has become an alternate convention.

A lot of the general tips still ring true, though. Gaudy designs or designs that show off while making the content less accessible will always be bad designs. Text lines should always be reasonably short (the rule I hear used is 12-24 words per line).

Dated or not, I do enjoy me some good and bad design.